This concept becomes dangerously twisted, however, when applied to victims of abuse such as sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, rape, and systemic oppression. That doesn’t stop many well-meaning spiritual people from using it to dismiss and otherwise invalidate the very real experiences of abuse victims. I’ve come across some form of it a lot over the course of my spiritual development, particularly in the early stages, including touting it as channeled information from spirit guides, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t educated enough on the subject to know better, and I took the word of psychics and channelers. Having had many years to grow in understanding and develop spiritually, I now realize how this is an over-simplification and only serves to damage and shame victims of abuse.

Some of the forms of this message have been:

 

• Your souls contracted for this experience.
• Your thoughts create your reality, therefore, your victim mentality created this situation.
• There’s an energy exchange between abuser and the abused, and if the abused wasn’t putting out that kind of energy they wouldn’t attract this experience.

I’d like to break each one of these down and explain why this is misunderstood and damaging.

“Your souls contracted for this experience”

If soul contracts in these situations are such a thing, then it is a contract to bring light to these dynamics so that they can be healed and ended. That does not mean that we simply dismiss it as “well, you signed up for this” and forget about it. It means that it’s a contract between all of us on earth–the person observing abusive situations–and the people specifically involved as well, and their dynamic is meant to teach us empathy and what it means to protect the vulnerable, so when someone dismisses abusive situations in this manner, they are not only enabling abusers and hurting victims, they are also engaging in spiritual bypassing by using spirituality to avoid having to feel uncomfortable emotions, which would be the catalyst for empathy.

Additionally, if we are to believe that there are multiple timelines in play and that multiverse theory is true, then we live in an infinite multiverse full of alternate and parallel realities where all possibilities exist and are experienced, including those that don’t involve abuse, and this would render the concept of soul contracts null and void.

Learn more about parallel realities.

“Your thoughts create your reality, therefore, your victim mentality created this situation.”

As I’ve said before… a victim mentality only exists when the abuse is imaginary… but even those victim mentalities are often rooted in real trauma and abuse. In that case, we must go back to the source.

Learn more about victim consciousness

A person’s first experience with abuse can never be the result of their own thoughts because the experience has never entered into their awareness. Especially when we are children, we haven’t yet fully developed a sense of self. Our brains don’t even finish forming until we’re 25 and we are at the mercy of the adult/child power dynamic. Therefore, any abuse perpetrated on a child by an adult can never be the result of law of attraction. Children don’t have the luxury of making their own decisions, much less forming complex belief systems about being victims. They do, after all, only come to believe they are the source of their abuse after the fact, and as adults, spend years unlearning that shame.

Abusive experiences and patterns are almost always ancestral, handed down from one generation and forcefully inflicted onto the next. By simply incarnating into that ancestral line, one will experience that abuse. This, you might call a soul contract. But soul contracts are not only meant to be experiences, they are meant to be opportunities to heal. As an observer of that contract, you become a part of the collective contract and you are offered an opportunity to heal group karma that enables abusers through rape culture, systemic racism, and other destructive social climates.

By telling someone that they manifested their abuse, you are absolving the abuser of accountability, and thus aiding in the manifestation of that experience by contributing to global karma that perpetuates those experiences.

“There’s an energy exchange between abuser and the abused, and if the the abused wasn’t putting out that kind of energy they wouldn’t attract this experience.”

With regard to there being an energy exchange between abuser and the abused – what this really means is boundaries.

People can only abuse you if you continue to allow it, and often times that requires learning to uphold and maintain healthy boundaries. But many times, power dynamics make upholding boundaries extremely difficult. It’s called abuse because the person or group who has the the most power is using that power to abuse a person or group who has less of it. This, too, is ancestral, because the only way a person or group obtains more power than another is by accumulating it over time (the only exception being a parent/child dynamic in which case it exists from the moment the child is born).

Who allowed that person to accumulate that power, unchecked?

Who continues to enable them to wield that power without consequence?

The answer is the collective. The family members who don’t speak up or step in. The friends who never say anything. The “good” cops who don’t report the bad cops. The people who say “boys will be boys.” The well-to-do family who protects their sons and daughters from the consequences of their actions.

All of the people who see this abuse taking place and say nothing? They are just as responsible, because they allow abusers to avoid being held accountable.

You can’t tell someone that they’ve manifested their own oppression or abuse without pointing the finger at yourself for being a part of the collective that allows it to continue.

So… let’s shut this toxic shit down wherever we see it. Okay?

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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